This week at RSA, NuData Security called for a fundamental shift in the way companies handle authentication by devaluing the data fraudsters have in abundance in favor of biometric and behavioral analytics.

According to a recent company statement, true fraud costs businesses $9 billion every year, but an astonishing $118 billion is lost to false positives, which occurs when valid customers are pushed back due to overzealous and inaccurate fraud detection.

Due to the abundance of easily accessible and inexpensive personally identifiable information (PII) for fraudsters, a new security methodology, one that looks at who the user is behind the device, offers far greater accuracy in preventing fraud without causing customer friction.

– Positively identifying more users: Using more layers within a single platform to validate a user increases the likelihood of positive user identification, which reduces false negatives.

– More confident identifications: As more layers overlap in the identification of a user, the confidence of the identification increases, which increases the true positives. Users of NuData Security’s NuDetect are able to identify more than 99 percent of users.

– Devaluing the data: Behavioral biometrics monitor physical usage signals such as the angle at which the device is held, typing speed and typical website navigation patterns to create a unique, behavior-based user profile that is far more detailed and reliable than standards like passwords and usernames. This data cannot be used if stolen, rendering it worthless to cybercriminals.

“Traditional authentication methods like usernames, passwords and personal information are no longer effective,” according to Ryan Wilk, vice president of customer success at NuData Security. “A paradigm shift in how we view fraud detection is essential to solve the current challenges we face across industries. Knowing a consumer’s behavior patterns transcends reliance on static identities and provides a stronger, better approach. The benefits here are twofold. First, behavioral biometrics adds the missing piece to a modern user authentication strategy, significantly increasing accuracy. Second, these pattern sets cannot be mimicked if stolen, which makes the data useless to criminals and therefore not worth their time. It’s a totally different way of thinking about fraud detection and protection, and one that’s highly necessary.”